Chazzan Maseng in "Truth Matters" (from the recent issue of "The Jewish Journal") gives a spurious, specious, and injurious reading of Parashat Shelach.
Certainly, "faith matters, and love matters, and hope matters," but for the writer to assume that they conflict with truth is unfounded.
He neglects another omnipresent variable in this conflict. There were facts, there was faith, but there was also the antithesis of both: fear.
Fear causes our senses to magnify challenges that are not so. Faith causes us to see opportunities which our senses miss or mistake for challenges.
Moses and the two faithful spies were truthful. Because of fear, the remaining ten spies were timid and despaired of ever taking the Promised Land.
Yet they forgot one crucial person in this adventure: God, YHWH, the Great "I AM" who promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants, the people of Israel.
Moses, Joshua, and Caleb were not spinning "the evil report" of the timid ten to puff up their outrageous fantasies; they were spurning the fear of the timid ten because they trusted the LORD. He had quite a track-record for trustworthiness.
It was the LORD who had preserved the Israelites during the Passover. He led them out of Egypt and across the Dead Sea. He drowned the Egyptian army with one crashing wave of the Red Sea. He faithfully maintained his Chosen People through the wilderness. It was the LORD who brought them to the Promised Land, a land "flowing with milk and honey", a land whose immense resources even the timid ten could not deny.
No one denied that there were giants in the land. Bear in mind, though, that when Moses dispatched the spies, he did not ask them to determine whether the Israelites could take the land or not. Moses wanted to know what the land was like, who lived there, and what was growing.
Moses, and the two true spies upon returning, understood that the Israelites would face immense challenges to take the Promised Land. Yet consider their faith transforming the facts into certain victory in light of the looming impasse which intimidated the timid ten:
Numbers 14: 8 — [Joshua said]: "If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it to us . . .
: 9 — " Only rebel ye not against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land."
Joshua clearly honored the One who would lead, empower, and enrich the Israelites: the LORD! If only the Israelites would trust the One who had led them so far. . .
Also, consider the ironic report of Rahab the harlot of Jericho when the next generation of Israelites laid siege to the city:
Joshua 2: 9 — [Rahab:] "I know that the LORD hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you."
While the previous generation of Israelites was fooled into fearing the Anakim of the Promised Land, in fact…IN TRUTH, the Anakim were afraid of the Israelites! Why? Because the LORD, who had promised them the land of Canaan, was with them. However, because the timid ten spies neglected to honor the LORD's power and presence in their lives, they chose fear and aroused doom in the hears of the previous generation of Israelites.
In short, Mr. Maseng is wrong to conclude that the Timid Ten spies were speaking the truth about the impossible conquest of the Promised Land. Distorted by fear because they refused to factor in the all-powerful God Most High, they proffered an "evil report", despising God's power by focusing exclusively on their own. Maseng is also wrong to claim that Moses was an invidious censor who "could not handle the truth" of the timid spies. His, and the LORD's, wrath stemmed from the stiff-necked Israelites refusal to trust the Holy One who had led them all this way, who would lead the next generation of Israelites to take the land which He had Promised 400 years before.